- Martin Floe
This just in. In an email (.pdf) to Ingraham High School staff, students and families today, Seattle Public Schools Interim Superintendent Susan Enfield announced that she has decided to renew Ingraham Principal Martin Floe’s contract for the 2011-12 school year.
Enfield’s decision to fire Floe a week ago prompted vociferous protests from the Ingraham community, many of whom bombarded her and the school board with emails. Enfield didn’t offer much explanation for Floe’s dismissal, except that it was based on a year-long performance review. Read the back story here, here and here.
Her announcement today to rehire Floe signals a victory for the Ingraham community, which worked tirelessly over the past week to support their principal.
In her email, Enfield writes:
Dear Ingraham staff, students and families:
When I was appointed Interim Superintendent, it was with the clear charge to strengthen opportunities for all students to learn. You asked me to bring high levels of transparency and accountability to this effort. The decision I made last Tuesday about the leadership of Ingraham High School Principal Martin Floe reflects my efforts to realize these commitments.
However, I also know that a good leader listens. After extensive conversations with Ingraham High School staff and the community, I have decided to renew Mr. Floe’s contact for the 2011-12 school year, under the condition that he continue on a plan of improvement, which I, along with his Executive Director, will monitor throughout the year.
If Seattle Public Schools is truly to make gains for our students, we must hold all of our leaders to a high standard of performance. The work my team completed over many months leading up to my initial decision not to renew Mr. Floe’s contract was, and is, solid. As I have explained, I am not able to share with you the details of Mr. Floe’s performance evaluations or the work done with him to address performance concerns. I assure you that I made this decision after a fair and rigorous process.
Before a decision about terminating a principal’s contract is made, the evaluation process includes identifying areas of concern through a mid-year evaluation, building a clear and detailed performance improvement plan with the principal, numerous one-on-one performance meetings, coaching sessions, time in the school by my team, bi-weekly reports with feedback on progress and very clear guidance to the principal about performance expectations. Only after this process had been completed and the principal had been offered support and opportunities to succeed would a decision be made to not renew a principal’s contract. A principal must demonstrate “unsatisfactory” performance on the performance improvement plan in order to be recommended for non-renewal.
We know high performance means not just high test scores but schools where every student has access to high-quality teaching in every classroom. That kind of performance depends on principals who work with their teachers day in and day out to improve the quality of their teaching practice. We rely on our principals for other things too, but this work with teachers—what I and others describe as “instructional leadership”— must be their top priority if we are to achieve what we say we all want for all children in Seattle.
We should all have very high standards for our leaders, and our strong team of Executive Directors of Schools will continue to work with all principals to ensure that our students achieve at high levels. I am mindful of the community input and the turmoil this situation has created for the school. I am not backing away from our high standards for performance or the work that led to my initial decision. However, I listened to the community input and I decided it is appropriate to provide Mr. Floe with an additional opportunity to succeed.
I had a chance to meet one-on-one with Mr. Floe on Monday, and I believe we can all work together to see improvement at Ingraham. I also want to thank the Ingraham staff and community for your obvious commitment to the school. Given today’s announcement, I am cancelling tonight’s community meeting at Ingraham. My hope is that now we can move forward as a community to ensure all of our students receive the very best we can give them.
Sincerely,
Susan
So we had a direction and made a decision, but then we decided to just listen to squabbling and make the angry mob happy, cause apparently we didnt know why we did it. This sounds like its going to be another awesome school administration.
Can we just fire this one now and get past the stupid drama that will come later.
What @1 said. You either believe in the decision or you don’t, Superintendent Enfield, and when you backpeddle this hard, this fast, it’s evidence that you either a) bad a bad decision in the beginning or b) are a weathervane that’s going to go whichever way the wind blows.
Time to ramp that superintendent search back up.
Or it’s also possible that she simply came to understand that she made a mistake, which is a quality of a strong leader. Just one interpretation.
As someone who knows this district, she made the right decision. It’s up to Floe now (although the district has to provide more supports for struggling high school students).
A wise person admits a mistake and tries to correct it. Susan Enfield has done this. As you may recall Dr. Goodloe-Johnson “my way or the highway” is no longer with us and she never listened to or had concern for the views of any of the school communities.
Unless you know Ingraham or this district, don’t judge from afar.
If it was a mistake, though, I’m more interested in the thought process that lead to her making the mistake. She very publically fired one of her high school principals and didn’t really seem to have a good reason why–not one that she could clearly articulate to the public, anyhow–and whether that decision was right or wrong, how she made it and how she followed it were both clearly deficient.
Susan Enfield is a mealy-mouthed weasel. Just my humble opinion, of course.
I’m not sure what to think about this, but I never was sure what to think.
We heard a lot of reasons for Mr. Floe’s dismissal, but none of them made sense.
We heard that the school had the second-worst test scores in the District, but that turned out to be untrue. The test scores aren’t great, but they are, for the most part, in the middle of the pack and representative of the District as a whole. If these test scores are bad then that’s true for the whole district and someone further up the chain should be dismissed as well.
We heard that Mr. Floe wasn’t an effective instructional leader for his teachers, but the teachers all immediately signed a petition expressing confidence in his leadership. The facts we knew didn’t reconcile with the claims from the District.
We heard that the District thought Mr. Floe had been doing a crap job for years now, but they promoted him as the person to develop and lead the new APP IB program and they promoted him to APP families to tempt them away from Garfield.
We heard that Mr. Floe was unwilling to change his role to the new vision of what a principal should do. Really? This friendly, easy-going guy was the most recalcitrant principal in the District? Really?
Then we heard that there were lots of excellent reasons to fire his ass, but the District couldn’t describe them to us to protect Mr. Floe’s privacy. Uh huh. After telling us all of this other stuff, now they want to protect his privacy and refuse to disclose or discuss personnel issues.
And now he gets to stay but he’s on double secret probation – or something like that.
None of this really fills me with confidence or trust. None of it really diminishes my confidence or trust either. It’s just more inane foolishness from the dysfunctional culture of Seattle Public Schools. Just another example of their ready, fire, aim process.